Collide-a-scape

I know the climate change debate is emotionally charged, but the ugly politics and paranoid thought processes that flow from it are breathtaking. People have become so blinded by their own sense of righteousness that it often makes rational debate all but impossible. What’s doubly disappointing is when this behavior is exhibited by those who have science pedigrees and claim the mantle of clear-thinking, science defender.

The blogosphere, of course, is where these shenanigans regularly play out. Two recent examples are notable. The first highlights the ugly politics aspect, the second the paranoid thought processes.

Exhibit A is from a serial offender who has waged a personal war with Andy Revkin for some time. Rather than summarize the latest bit of Rommian theatrics, I’ll let you go have a look yourself, including this from Revkin. Truth is, many of the saner folks on Romm’s side of the climate debate have grown weary of his antics. They tune out the rants. To them, he’s like the outlandish, bombastic uncle at Thanksgiving that everybody tolerates because he’s part of the family. But behind his back, they’re rolling their eyes at his unseemly outbursts.

Exhibit B is this post and thread from Michael Tobis at his new home, Planet 3.0: Beyond Sustainability. I have much higher expectations of Michael, and have previously expressed great hopes for the site he has created. But in the aforementioned post’s discussion on recent scholarship that has challenged Jared Diamond’s eco-collapse narrative for Easter Island, Michael made a startlingly biased and willfully ignorant argument. It’s so unbelievable that I’m going to excerpt the highlights. They occurred during an exchange with the two archaeologists who came by to discuss the findings of their book with Michael in the thread of his post.

(For background on this debate, see this, this, and this, in order. I also wrote up a related post here.)

So Michael’s post is called The Statues that Walked, which happens to be the title of the recently published book by archaeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt. As I mentioned, it calls into question much of what people think they know about Easter Island, in particular it’s validity as a popular environmentalist metaphor.

Here is an excerpt from Carl Lipo’s first comment at the thread, addressed to Michael:

I agree we should all be wary of “denialists” who challenge scientific findings simply to further some agenda. Many of these are exactly what you describe — pseudo-science, arguments by authority and common sense logic. Our evaluation of the archaeological record of Easter Island (documented in our book, The Statues That Walked) was not done to simply “deny” the Collapse story that has been long associated with it. As archaeologists, we went to the island fully expecting to be able to study the growth of the island’s population after colonization and eventual collapse that was reported to have occurred ca. AD1680. It was much to our surprise that the archaeological record simply didn’t have evidence that supported much of what has been claimed — no evidence for cannibalism, no evidence for widespread lethal warfare, no evidence for the 10,000+ population that has been argued to have once lived on the island and so on. Our best explanation of what we could find in the record is that there never was a prehistoric collapse and much of the features associated with “collapse” come from the effects of contact and post-contact history.

Lipo closed with this:

I urge you to evaluate the book on its own merits — examine the evidence we present and see if you can find a better explanation then what we arrive at. We greatly appreciate any dialogue on these grounds.

Here’s the first sentence of Michael’s response:

The tone of reasonableness in your reply, which we have learned to expect from the most egregious misrepresenters of climate science, is less reassuring for me than it might be for someone who hasn’t engaged in that way.

Now if I was Lipo, right there I would have concluded that Michael is not interested in having a discussion in good faith. Then, after cataloguing a list of bullet points he feels that Lipo did not adequately answer, Michael ends on this note:

In short, Diamond has drawn a tightly coherent picture and you have replied with a scattershot set of critiques that leaves a plethora of loose ends. Your argumentation is thus very remeniscent of the “climate skeptics”, (leaving aside that you reference the work of one of them in their pet journal) providing, in answer to a coherent theory, a whole slew of doubts on particulars and a barely plausible scenario with little underlying structure. It’s, at best, intellectually dissatisfying. That isn’t really evidence against your position. However, it matches my prior expectation that emotionally resonant results about sustainability will always end up challenged and obfuscated. Therefore the burden of proof, in my estimation, lies with you.

Would you be willing to identify who funded your research?

Now I had already been participating in this exchange, and became incredulous at that point. I asked Michael if he had read the book that lays out the argument he was crudely disparaging (“reminiscent of climate skeptics…”), and what he was insinuating about the funding issue. He responded:

I haven’t read the book. I am trying to decide whether it is worth reading.

Consider that if Diamond is wrong about Easter Island, I have little intrinsic interest in Easter Island. I do want to know if he was totally wrong of course, but I don’t want to read a book about it.

Yet Michael feels free to pass judgement on the argument and evidence made in the book, without actually having read it. What’s more, even though he wants to know if Diamond is wrong, he’s not sufficiently interested in Easter Island to read a book by respected scholars that lays waste to the Easter Island mythology. Oh, and about that funding question he posed:

My question is whether they got funding from a private source because somebody disliked Diamond’s 2004 book. If they went through normal channels with an interest in Easter Island that would refute my suspicion that their mission was postnormal as opposed to normal science.

Carl Lipo responded:

If you are not willing to read our book then there is precious little to discuss since you apparently know what the answers are already. If you would like to discuss the evidence of the record and how archaeologists have been explaining it for the past 10-15 years, I would be happy to talk. But if you want to keep to your faith-based approach, there little hope of finding a common ground. Your suspicions about funding sources also makes me wonder if you also prefer tin-foil hats.

Michael, finally revealing that he has no interest in “scientifically informed conversation” on Easter Island  (the quote is from the blurb about what the Planet 3.0 website strives for), comes back with this:

My interest is not in the substance unless Lipo & Hunt make a dramatically more compelling case than they seem able to. My interest remains mostly about what Peiser and E&E have to do with it.

Let me get this straight. Michael is not interested in the substance of the debate, unless the two archaeologists can make a more compelling case. But he doesn’t want to read their book. Well, maybe the authors should act out the evidence for him. Perhaps that would be more compelling. As for his abiding interest in a single source (who is an ardent climate contrarian), Lipo addressed that issue in one of his comments:

I should also note that while we are aware of Peiser’s argument (and others e.g., Rainbird) we did not in anyway rely on his claims. We are not stooges for anti-environment corporate entities. Both of us are faculty at public universities. Our intentions are archaeological in nature and in doing science the best that we can. If you examine our cumulative academic record of publications you will find that we are both ardent supporters of science (and have even been criticized by some of our colleagues as been “too scientific” in our demands for constraining our explanations to descriptions of the empirical record).

Another commenter offers this advice to Michael:

I think we’d need to read their book before claiming that they’re offering scattered contradictions rather than a coherent thesis.

But that would mean acting like a scientist, and actually examining the evidence for yourself, rather than being cavalierly dismissive. Not all scientists want to do that, it seems.

I said I would talk about the “collapse” concept while I’m here, so here’s a start.  This topic has gotten a lot of play in the public discourse in the past few years, as the prospect of severe impacts from climate change has led to an increase in apocalyptic doomsaying among certain environmentalists and others as well as a renewed interest in studying past episodes of societal collapse to understand their dynamics and whatever lessons they may hold for us today.  Jared Diamond‘s 2005 book Collapse is probably the best-known and most prominent examples of this type of thinking.  I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on the specifics of it, but it’s gotten quite a bit of criticism from various quarters that I think is important to acknowledge regardless of the merits of Diamond’s argument overall.

First, though, we need to understand what exactly we mean by “collapse.”  What does it mean for a society to collapse?  Intuitively it seems obvious, but there are actually a variety of processes that have been interpreted as “collapses” in both the scholarly and popular literature, and the term is often left undefined.  One place to start is with a 2006 review article by Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist now at Utah State University who, unlike many people who have been talking loudly about collapse in the past few years, is an actual expert on the subject who has been studying it for decades.  In the article Tainter discusses Diamond’s book at length, along with a variety of other primarily scholarly studies explaining various events in the archaeological record in terms of societal collapse.  More specifically, the works Tainter talks about here deal with one type of collapse, that attributed to “overshoot,” i.e., the overexploitation of natural resources through either population growth or increased per capita consumption.  This is the type of collapse that gets the most attention in a modern context, since the idea behind most predictions of doom for our own society is that we are on an unsustainable trajectory due to expanding population or overconsumption.  The overpopulation argument goes back to Thomas Malthus, of course, and its current form owes a lot to Paul Ehrlich‘s 1968 book The Population Bomb.  More recently this concept of overpopulation has been variously supplemented or replaced by the idea that it is per capita consumption, especially in wealthy nations like the US, that is on an unsustainable course that will lead to exhaustion of natural resources and, perhaps, societal collapse.  There are other ways societies can collapse, but this is the one people tend to be worried about today, and finding examples of it in the archaeological record has been a high priority for many people.

Tainter’s article goes through a variety of collapses that have been linked to overshoot, and finds most of them severely wanting in evidence.  He is particularly scathing about Diamond’s work, calling his discussion of the Anasazi “a confused muddle” and rejecting many of the case studies in the book as not even really being examples of collapse at all, but rather unsuccessful attempts to colonize areas unsuitable for the subsistence practices of the colonizers, who eventually died or left.  Tainter’s criteria for collapse rely heavily on a loss of complexity, with a “simpler” society succeeding a more “complex” one, and this notion is echoed in Diamond’s stated criteria for collapse as well, although Tainter argues that Diamond doesn’t actually apply these criteria rigorously and consistently.  Instead,

Diamond’s approach was seemingly to find cases where (a) bad things happened, and (b) he could construct a plausible environmental reason. The outcomes, however diverse their nature, are lumped into the category “collapse.”

The one case that Tainter does give some credence to is Easter Island, although even here he notes substantial criticism of the overshoot model of deforestation leading to the collapse of the complex society that developed there.  The cases he finds most convincing as examples of overshoot leading to collapse are the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Abbasid Caliphate, both in southern Mesopotamia though separated by thousands of years.  Even here, though, Tainter sees the collapse as being less a result of “pure” environmental degradation and more a matter of inadequate decision-making by elites in response to problems caused by overexploitation of natural resources, in these cases salinization caused by intensive irrigation agriculture.  In most of the other cases of collapse, the major problem seems to have been climatic or other uncontrollable changes that disrupted systems that had worked fine otherwise, in many cases probably combined with the same problems of poor decision-making.

Now, climate change and poor decision-making are obviously factors that are very relevant to modern-day problems, so in a sense Tainter’s dismissal of overshoot-based collapse theories in archaeology doesn’t matter too much for the relevance of case studies like Diamond’s to the present day.  Indeed, it seems like the overall negative tone of the review article is a function largely of its narrow focus on overshoot specifically rather than collapse in general.  Still, Tainter’s conclusion, surprising even to him, that there are very few documented cases of environmental degradation due to human exploitation leading to societal collapse is an important cautionary note in showing how important it is to carefully analyze the archaeological record before trying to apply its lessons to contemporary problems.

There’s a fascinating, informative discussion thread on the dynamics of societal collapse over at The Oil Drum, prompted by a very readable 10,000 word essay on the fall of the Roman empire, cleverly entitled, “Peak Civilization.”

This is really complicated stuff that the news media utterly fails to convey, preferring instead to focus on single-cause “forcings,” be it drought, climate change, overpopulation, or overexploitation of natural resources. I’m susceptible to this myself with respect to drought.

Of course, the media takes its cue from scholars such as Jared Diamond, whose one-size-fits all thesis is pretty well deconstructed by Joseph Tainter. Fans of Tainter will be heartened to know that his work is intelligently discussed (as far as I can tell) at the aforementioned essay and comment thread on The Oil Drum.

So the battle is joined:

“The complaint has no merit at all,” Jared Diamond tells Science magazine in an exclusive interview published today, referring to the $10 million lawsuit filed against him and The New Yorker, for his April 2008 piece on a blood feud in Papua New Guinea.

The Science story is only available to subscribers, or those with online access, but the author, Michael Balter, has excerpts on his blog, including this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick:

It appears that The New Yorker and Jared Diamond are the subject of an unfair and, frankly, mystifying barrage of accusations.

He’s talking to you, Rhonda Shearer, and to a lesser extent, you guys over at Savage Minds.  Time to double-down?

Hey, quite a spectacle over at Savage Minds, with a bunch of anthros, (apparent) journos and one sculptor/art historian-turned bloodhound ripping each other to shreds.

People, people, is that any way to run a truth squad?

The wolf-pack is tearing away at Jared Diamond. Opportunity knocks:

part of the reason…is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to “experts” like Jared Diamond. With this series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology.

If the first essay is any indication of what’s to come, good luck with that.

Anthropologists are fretting over the Jared Diamond fallout.

Dudes, you can’t have it both ways; you can’t engage the public (which is what many of you want) without risking that your work will be interpreted in ways that you never intended. Diamond is an easy straw man because he’s not a member of your club. (And, yeah, because he now might be in a heap of trouble.)

I also have a hard time believing that one writer could embody a whole field, which is what anthropologists seem to believe. If Diamond is the public face of anthropology, don’t blame him. Blame yourselves, blame your own field for not cultivating any cross-over scholars that know how to write for your flagship journals as well as for Harper’s or The New Yorker.

Historians don’t have this kind of problem (or defensive posture). Nor do political scientists or biologists.

So stop bitching about Diamond and start writing (especially if you have tenure) for larger audiences than a couple of dozen fellow scholars. Yes, a place like Savage Minds is a good start, but it’s still an insular world.  Take a look at Patty Limerick’s example if you want to see how it’s done. She’s a highly respected environmental historian who over the years has written regularly for newspapers, including a guest op-ed stint for the NY Times.

Calling all Savage Mind bloggers. I’m sure one of you can rise to the occasion.

Some months ago, Joseph Tainter published a withering essay entitled, “Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.”

The title is a clever play off of Jared Diamond’s 2005 best-seller. Anyone interested in an overview of collapse literature and a counter-perspective to the current popularizing of the concept should read Tainter’s essay. As he writes at the outset,

There is a long history, within anthropology and other social sciences, of scholarly interest in the environmental dimensions of social life…In general the literature of this strand postulates that collapses result from shortages of resources, brought on by normal environmental variation, abrupt climate shifts, or human damage.

More recently, Tainter notes, contemporary scholars have fueled “discussions of our own sustainability and sustainable development,” which

postulate that ancient societies collapsed because they degraded their environments, justifying the concern that today’s socieites could collapse for the same reason.

A parable that many have latched on to is the case of Easter Island.  As demonstrated yesterday in this post by my colleague Tom Yulsman, scientists and science journalists join environmentalists in viewing Easter Island as a cautionary tale for our times.

The true “collapse” of Easter Island, however, is more complex than ecological degradation via over-exploitation. Even Wikipedia offers a more nuanced perspective than is commonly known:

A series of devastating events killed or removed almost the entire population of Easter Island in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island’s population. A dozen islanders managed to return from their slavery, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island’s population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried. Contributing to the chaos were violent clan wars with the remaining people fighting over the newly available lands of the deceased, bringing further famine and death among the dwindling population.

Tainter discusses this history in his essay, as well as other complicating factors, such as the possible role of the Polynesian rat (introduced by islanders) on the decline of the Palm forest. (Tainter is not a lone critic, either. See here, for more on those rats.)

Diamond’s use of Easter Island and other case studies in “Collapse” strike Tainter as too convenient:

Jared Diamond is a man with a message. At least that was his intention. Collapse (2005) was meant to tell how anthropogenic environmental degradation doomed past societies and, on a grander scale, will undermine us if we don’t change.

That last point may well prove true, but trumpeting Easter Island as a cautionary lesson appears to rest on scientifically shaky ground.